("I gazed up to find Obama staring down at me …" "I feel a little
creepy being here," I said. "Why don't I get out of your hair?"
He laughed. "C'mon," he said …" etc.)

Anyway: Obama goes to bed at 1am and gets up at 7am. Michelle
goes to bed at 10pm. There are doors in the floor of Air Force
One to accommodate a president's coffin, should the need arise.
Obama junked Bush's ornamental china ("I'm not a dish guy") when
he moved into the West Wing and replaced it with "original
applications for several famous patents and patent models",
including "Samuel Morses' 1849 model for the first telegraph".

He also had a rug made, interwoven with inspirational quotes not
detailed in the piece, which makes one wonder. "Smile and the
world smiles with you?" "You don't have to be crazy to work here,
but it helps!"? Perhaps the White House redacted them, like the
name of the movie that made Obama cry.

The whole piece is reminiscent of
Martin Amis's 2007 profile of Tony Blair in the Guardian, in
which he applied a novelist's eye to the prime minister's last
few months in office, and annoyed a lot of political hacks.
(Political hacks are always annoyed when a fancy-pants novelist –
here's Amis, describing a car journey with Blair: "the crouched
policemen, in their Day-Glo yellow strip, buzz past like
purposeful hornets to liberate the road ahead" – shambles across
their territory, chucking out metaphors and behaving as if he is
the first civilian with language skills ever to have encountered
a motorcade.)

To add insult to injury in the Lewis piece, it transpired that
Vanity Fair gave quote approval to the Whitehouse, a measure
usually reserved for low-stakes Hollywood puff pieces, and a
condition that the big beasts tell themselves they would never
have agreed to – although, as
Glenn Greenwald points out, a kind of undeclared quote
approval among suckier elements of the Whitehouse press corps
makes formal agreement unnecessary.

In this case, judging by the moony tone of the piece, Obama was
never in any danger of Trojan Horse tactics. (One of Lewis's
first questions on entering the Whitehouse is "when people come
here, are they nervous?")

Beyond a certain point, all of this is moot, however, since the
aim of the profile clearly wasn't to grill the president on
policy or political philosophy so much as to illuminate something
less tangible – what it is like, existentially, to do his job.
Here, Lewis harvests some interesting stuff.

"You need to focus your decision-making energy." [Obama says].
"You need to routinize yourself. You can't be going through the
day distracted by trivia." The self-discipline he believes is
required to do the job well comes at a high price. "You can't
wander around," he said.

"It's much harder to be surprised. You don't have those moments
of serendipity. You don't bump into a friend in a restaurant
you haven't seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss
of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you
don't get used to it – at least I don't."

And:

"Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable.
Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up
dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you'll
wind up with a 30 to 40% chance that it isn't going to work.
You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made
the decision. You can't be paralyzed by the fact that it might
not work out."

And:

"The first night you sleep in the White House, you're thinking,
All right. I'm in the White House. And I'm sleeping here." He
laughed. "There's a time in the middle of the night when you
just kind of startle awake. There's a little bit of a sense of
absurdity. There is such an element of randomness in who gets
this job. What am I here for? Why am I walking around the
Lincoln Bedroom? That doesn't last long. A week into it you're
on the job."

If you don't exercise, says Obama, you're finished; and Lewis
duly trails him to a basketball game, where the president "smiles
when he misses". However stage-managed, this human stuff still
offers a fascinating glimpse into the mental and emotional
endurance test of being a man without peers.

And so, where does the president turn for comfort? He watches the
sports channel ESPN. He
hangs out with the "best friend", Marty, whom he knew before he
was famous. And he reads. On top of a pile of paperwork in
Obama's study, reports Lewis, is Julian Barnes's Booker Prize
winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, a delicately angled
choice: a literary hit but not so obvious it looks focus-grouped;
international in scope and an example of the sophisticated,
self-analysing sensibility used by Obama's critics to paint him
as elitist.

Having the president of the United States read your novel is the
ultimate test of the principle that good writing makes every
reader think it's about them. In this case, that inclusionary
principle washes back over the president. Barnes's exquisitely
tempered novel is a long way from the White House – the
protagonist is a Brit who has failed at most things – and yet
there it is, the common strand, the arc of empathy: the story of
a man going back over his life, weighing the choices he made and
their long-range consequences, wondering, at the end of the day,
if he did the right thing.